Last Flag Flying

From Chi­na­town to The French Con­nec­tion, Sat­ur­day Night Fever to The Last Pic­ture Show, many of the era-defin­ing Amer­i­can films of the 1970s spawned unusu­al, low-key sequels, each con­cerned with the notions of lega­cy and tran­sience. Where the great New Hol­ly­wood mas­ter­pieces were nihilis­tic, their sequels, like Jack Nicholson’s The Two Jakes or Sylvester Stallone’s Stay­ing Alive are fatal­is­tic. They are gen­tler, more melan­cholic films, pre­oc­cu­pied with a sense of long­ing for the past.

Richard Linklater’s Last Flag Fly­ing, a ​“spir­i­tu­al sequel” to Hal Ashby’s 1971 clas­sic The Last Detail (the names and a few facts have changed), recalls the great­est of these sequels: Peter Bogdanovich’s Tex­as­ville. Both are works of gen­er­ous, com­pas­sion­ate Amer­i­cana which revis­it the char­ac­ters of the orig­i­nals at mid­dle age, and each is con­cerned with the pas­sage of time, with missed con­nec­tions and paths not taken.

Last Flag Fly­ing is set in 2003 and sees for­mer Navy man ​“Doc” Shep­herd (Steve Carell) reunite with ex-Marines Sal Nealon (Bryan Cranston) and Richard Mueller (Lau­rence Fish­burne), 30 years after they served togeth­er in Viet­nam – to help trans­port the body of Shepherd’s son, recent­ly killed in Iraq, to be buried at home in New Hamp­shire. In the clas­sic Lin­klater tra­di­tion, it’s a pro­found reflec­tion on Amer­i­can val­ues played as a hilar­i­ous and pro­fane hang­out film.

It’s an Amer­i­can road movie where the sense of Amer­i­ca is not in the places they vis­it, but in the tenor of the con­ver­sa­tions between the cen­tral trio; the way they bick­er, joke and rem­i­nisce about every­thing from their time in the forces to the mer­its of Eminem – think Slack­er among the Marines.

The sharp edges and bleak loqua­cious­ness of The Last Detail have been mod­u­lat­ed by age – these men were once fight­ing the future, now they’re nego­ti­at­ing with their past. It’s a call and response to The Last Detail, treat­ing the events of Ashby’s film like a half-formed mem­o­ry, a piece of his­to­ry plucked from the recess­es of the nation­al con­scious­ness. It’s a film about a chang­ing coun­try, about what’s been gained and lost in the gulf between Viet­nam and Iraq, between New Hol­ly­wood and the con­tem­po­rary Amer­i­can cinema.

Time is the uni­fy­ing theme of Linklater’s work, and his sequels and remakes fea­ture some of his most per­cep­tive takes on the top­ic, from age­ing in the face of love’s ever-fixed mark in the Before films to the pre­car­i­ous bound­ary of adult­hood in Every­body Wants Some!!.

It feels dis­ori­en­tat­ing, even uncan­ny, to see the recent past treat­ed as a bygone era, but it pro­vides a dif­fer­ent angle from which to con­sid­er a war that dom­i­nat­ed the pub­lic dis­course in the first decade of the 21^st cen­tu­ry. In this sense, it is clos­er in essence to the great home front movies of the 1940s than to con­tem­po­rary Iraq movies like Kathryn Bigelow’s The Hurt Lock­er – a step removed from the fight­ing, but right at the heart of a more spir­i­tu­al con­flict. Last Flag Fly­ing may feel like a film out of time in the present moment, but it’s a ter­rif­i­cal­ly fun­ny, deeply mov­ing pic­ture whose time will sure­ly come.